This diversion made him glad; he thought that this task might perhaps
preserve him from vain thoughts of his discomfiture at Chartres and his
fancy for the cloister.

"What can I send to the _Review_?" said he to himself. "Since what they
chiefly ask for is criticism of religious art, I might write some short
study of the early German painters. I have ample notes, made on the spot
in the galleries there; let us see!"

He turned them over, lingering to read a note-book containing his
impressions of travel. A summing up of his remarks on the School of
Cologne arrested his attention.

At every page he gave vent to his surprise in more and more vehement
exclamations, at the false ideas and absurd theories put forward for so
many years with regard to these pictures.

Every writer, without exception, had expatiated, each more
enthusiastically than the last, on the pure and religious art of these
early painters, speaking of them as seraphic artists who had depicted
superhuman beauty, white and sylph-like Virgins all soul, standing out
like celestial visions, against backgrounds of gold.

Durtal, prejudiced by the unanimity of this universal praise, expected
to find almost impalpably fair angels, Flemish Madonnas, etherealized in
some sort, having shed their husk of flesh, rapturous Memlings with eyes
full of heaven, and bodies that had almost ceased to be--and he
remembered his dismay on entering the galleries of the Cologne Museum.

In point of fact his disenchantment had begun as soon as he stepped out
of the train. Carried in the course of a night from Paris to that city,
he had made his way through narrow streets where every basement window
exhaled the fragrance of _sauerkraut_, and he had reached the cathedral
square, beautified by Farina's shop-signs, where in front of the famous
Dom he had been obliged to confess that this facade, this exterior, was
a huge piece of patchwork--a delusion. Every part of it was furbished
up, and the church sheltered no sculpture under its portals; it was
symmetrical, built by peg and line; its rigid forms, its hard outlines
were an offence.

The interior was better, in spite of the vulgar blaze, the cheap
fireworks, of ignoble modern glass. And there, in a chapel near the
choir, might be seen, for a consideration, the most famous picture of
the German school, the _Dombild_, by Stephan Lochner, a triptych
representing the Adoration of the Magi on the centre panel, with St.
Ursula o